IT'S in our nature as concerned citizens of an affluent, peaceable, cosseted country that we relate to the wider world in the manner of a morality play.
Our emotions are engaged with other peoples and places to the extent that they arouse our pity, outrage or bad conscience, in varying measures. The play runs its course; the players strike their poses; vice or virtue is triumphant according to the enigmatic rules of fate; and our attentions duly re-engage themselves with some other unhappy locale whose more immediate trials have newly aroused our imaginations.
So it was two years ago when the rust-smeared, weary Chinese container ship An Yue Jiang -- flagged to the port of Guangzhou in China's industrial heartland -- embarked for Durban, South Africa, with a cargo of arms destined for the Zimbabwean defence ministry.
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